This is the New Farthest Galaxy in the Universe

A team of researchers has identified the most distant galaxy currently measured in the night sky. Galaxy EGS-zs8-1 is so far from our planet that we’re only now seeing light it emitted a staggering 13 billion years ago.

The galaxy is thought to have formed when the Universe was extremely young—clearly the case given the Universe is only a bit older than the galaxy’s light, at 13.8 billion years old. The galaxy’s age was determined using the MOSFIRE instrument on the W.M. Keck Observatory’s 10-metre telescope, in Hawaii. In a press release, Pascal Oesch, one of the researchers, explained that“it has already built more than 15% of the mass of our own Milky Way today. But it had only 670 million years to do so. The universe was still very young then.” [Yale]